The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.
A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.
If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.
Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.
https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/about/faq...
> the CPS Voting and Registration Supplement does not ask any questions of a partisan nature.
There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.
The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data collection mechanism.
This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, policy decisions should not require IRS data. (Or other personal data.)
But to get around such laws, the government asks citizens to provide that data a second time (in the census). And sometimes it's asked yet again on other forms. This seems to defeat the purpose of those laws.
I can see that federal disaster aid might need to know if some area needs more or less aid, depending on the wealth of the area receiving aid. If aid is given to individuals, the have a need to know the individuals' income.
When there is a reasonable need to know, I would prefer the government use the much more accurate IRS data, rather than ask for people's income multiple times. The laws preventing merging federal datasets could be rethought, given what is now known about preserving privacy mathematically. I would like to see specific exemptions made, with the provided data properly anonymized to preserve privacy while serving the legitimate purpose for which the data was requested. The use of such data should require a request to congress for it.
It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).
> The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
The key thing you're missing is "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct".
Congress has passed a whole bunch of laws that attach additional responsibilities to the census for the purpose of supporting government decisions.
The Permanent Census Office Act of 1902 for example, which established the census office and tacked on "an annual survey of cotton production, and other economic censuses" https://www.census.gov/about/history/historical-censuses-and...
I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.
Detailed census records are published 72 years after they were collected; the last release (of 1950 census data) came out in 2022; the next one should be published in 2032.
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2022/01/20/census-record...
TBH I don't think the people who wrote this knew how much collateral impact it would have.
I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.
This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.
As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.
The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.
2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities.
3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell.
4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals.
5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.
While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.
This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.
Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.
They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.
But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?
But we do. A detailed census is essential for making good policy. For example, knowing the age and distribution of children across the country helps local and state governments decide where to put the next school or children's hospital. The federal govt. allocates funds for education and daycare accordingly.
The census is the best and most important measure of govt. policy. Taking it away would leave everyone worse off.
You do realize there are places where there aren't schools or hospitals?